Enquanto o dia
acontece, começo pelo fim. A janela. Compõe-se o dia; apareceu um
sol de gato, olhei o céu e percebi que somos crescidos quando deixamos de
olhar as nuvens. Perplexidades e glóbulos coloridos são mentalmente
indigestos por isso me deixo pijamar numa preguiça de nada explicar.
Quem quer histórias vai ter que procurar a papa noutra mama. Eu
fiquei como já fui, a ver uma nuvem a diabrar. Borlices que ainda
há, estás fodido rapaz...
E o princípio,
sério e triste é o Bataille que me acompanhou, manhã cedo de mais, os cigarros e o café
desta melancólica existência em que empanei.
Bataille
um e dois
Nunca
“pegou” por cá, o Bataille. Umas prosas (vendáveis, que o
burguês gosta de picante na gastronomia literária « - e o picante
é caseiro?... Ah, nesse caso...»). Mais do que por antipatia(s),
penso que pela heterodoxia e pela definição Leiriesca (está no
texto e é de tradução impossível). Personagem, obra e temáticas
na mesma capela? Pois...
Ficamos
a perder, nem que seja pela sua relação com as vanguardas. As,
agora, de museu e mausoléu. Não vou botar discurso nem marchar na
parada: deixo a introdução ao catálogo da exposição “Undercover
Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS” de 2006.
O
Bataille dois é precisamente isso: um catálogo. Trezentas páginas
de fazerem corar muitos curadores e especialistas, muito vendedor de
prosa, a confraria (quase) toda.
Por
e para mim já tenho para uns dias (e vou poupar). Bem sei que os
cinquenta vão-se fazendo notar, mas havendo interessados: o cú e 5
euros por um original...
Georges Bataille
(I897-1962) - numismatist, scholar, pornographer, social critic and
idiosyncratic philosopher - remains a profoundly influential and
controversial thinker and writer. Described by his friend Michel
Leiris as 'Bataille the impossible', he represented in the late
1920s an intellectual, internal opposition to Andre Breton's
Surrealism, which attracted many of the best non conformist poets,
artists and writers of the age. Bataille's most visible contribution
to contemporary thought was in the form of the review DOCUMENTS,
which ran for 15 issues through 1929 and 1930.
Conceived as a
'war machine against received ideas', DOCUMENTS drew in several
dissident surrealists such as Michel Leiris, Joan Miró, Robert
Desnos and André Masson. Never himself a member of the movement,
Bataille later at the time when Jean-Paul Sartre was leading the
post-war attack on Surrealism, expressed a fundamental if critical
sympathy with it as 'genuinely virile opposition - nothing
conciliatory, nothing divine - to all accepted limits, a rigorous
will to insubordination.' As, in his own words, Surrealism's 'old
enemy from within',
Bataille was nonetheless uncompromising in his disdain for art as
panacea and substitute for human experience, his problem
remaining 'the place that Surrealism gave to poetry and painting:
it placed the work before being'.
DOCUMENTS'
approach to the visual opposed that of Breton at every turn. Breton
and the surrealists had proposed various ways of achieving immediacy
of expression: through automatic writing and drawing they had tried
to circumvent the conscious control of image-making, while Sigmund
Freud's theories had provided a symbolic code through which dreams
and the workings of the unconscious mind could be noted and
interpreted. In the heterogeneous visual material included in
DOCUMENTS Bataille and his colleagues Michel Leiris, Robert
Desnos and Carl Einstein engaged with and challenged such ideas
which, they claimed, far from confronting the base realities of human
thought and the violent nature of desire, actually idealised and
sublimated them. Instead, DOCUMENTS
utilised strategies of de-sublimation, allowing an unblinking stare
at violence, sacrifice and seduction through which art was 'brought
down' to the level of other kinds of objects.
Although
Surrealism is not openly discussed in its pages, the implied critique
of Breton's movement, the
constant harping on a 'base materialism' as opposed to the
elevation of poetic thought, as well as the flagrant play with the
surrealist principle of cultural collage, the juxtaposition of
'distant realities', was sufficiently provocative for Breton to
react furiously in his Second Manifesto
of Surrealism (1929), one of the very
rare occasions when he names Bataille, and to whom he devotes several
pages of well-aimed invective.
DOCUMENTS
encompassed art, ethnography, archaeology, film, photography and
popular culture, with discussions of jazz and music hall
performances beside the work of major modern artists, and
illuminated manuscripts and sacred stone circles alongside an
analysis of the big toe. t was also the home of a 'Critical
Dictionary', to which Bataille and his closest colleagues
contributed short essays on, among other things, 'Absolute', 'Man',
'Abattoir', 'Eye', 'Factory Chimney' and
'Dust'. A dictionary would begin, Bataille wrote in his entry
'Formless', when it provided not the meanings but the tasks of
words. This short text
alone has had a remarkable afterlife as a critical tool for
the analysis of contemporary art. The exhibition Informe
at the Centre Pompidou in 1997 attacked the unity of modernist
readings of art by proposing a set of alternative and unstable
'operations' by which works were discussed not in terms of meanings
but in relation to 'horizontality', 'base materialism', 'pulse'
and entropy.
DOCUMENTS'
unlikely cradle was the Cabinet des medailles at the Bibliotheque
Nationale de France, where Bataille was following a (promising)
career as a numismatist together with the journal's co-founder
Pierre d'Espezel . Another colleague, Jean Babelon, was also on the
editorial board. The magazine's financial backer was Georges
'Vildenstein, whose Gazette des
beaux-arts was one of the longest
established art reviews in Paris. The various expectations of
the new review on the parts of Vildenstein, the editorial board
and Bataille himself did not cohere.
Bataille's approach grated
with DOCUMENTS' backer and the more conservative members of the board
from the very start. 'What he meant by his title was not what
they had expected, and d'Espezel wrote after the first issue:
'The title you
have chosen for this review is barely justified only in the sense
that it gives us "Documents" on your state of mind.
That's a lot, but not quite enough. It's essential to return to the
spirit which inspired us in the first project for the review, when
you and I talked about it to M Vildenstein.'
Bataille's essay
'The Academic Horse' had flouted scholarly academic traditions of
objectivity and was a foretaste of what was to come. Presumably
Vildenstein had expected another luxurious version of the Gazette
des beaux-arts with the addition of
'primitive art'. However, Bataille's choice of rubric for
DOCUMENTS- Doctrines, Archéologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie -
already distanced it from the primitivist aesthetic then fashionable
in Paris. 'It announces that DOCUMENTS is not
another Gazette des beaux-arts
and above all not a Gazette des
beaux-arts primitifs'.
Three
of the subjects on DOCUMENTS' cover remained constant: Archaeology,
Fine Arts and Ethnography. For the first three issues 'Doctrines'
headed the list; from the fourth issue this disappeared to be
replaced at the bottom, as on a departure board, by 'Variétés'.
These five subjects define the ostensible coverage of material
in the journal. 'Doctrines' was a more unusual term in the
context of the avant-garde magazines than 'Documents' itself, and
what it signified for Bataille is unclear. Doctrines are defined by
and define 'moral communities' and religions, and later Bataille
insisted on thus describing
Surrealism. Perhaps 'Doctrines' was
intended to stand both for those beliefs held by declared
religions and for those of tnore occult communities, such
as Surrealism.
For
the first five issues of DOCUMENTS an editorial board of 11,
including scholars and museum professionals as well as
Vildenstein, Carl Einstein and Georges Henri Rivière, was
named, with Bataille taking the title of 'general secretary'.
Subsequent issues omit the editorial board and credit Bataille
alone as general secretary, which indicates a more managerial or
administrative position, leaving the absorbing question of
editorial control unresolved. However Bataille
later wrote that he 'really edited [DOCUMENTS] in agreement with
Georges Henri Rivière ... and against the titular editor, the
German poet Carl Einstein'. Although Einstein continued to contribute
to DOCUMENTS until the end, his ambitions to draw in German scholars
and in particular to establish a link with the 'Varburg
Institute in Hamburg were only partially realised.
DOCUMENTS'
title was both camouflage and challenge. It was not, in
itself, so out of line with the flush of new journals dealing with
art and contemporary culture in Europe at the time. Most spiced
their covers with the promise of a range of subjects of
contemporary interest. The Belgian
Variétés.
which was regularly advertised in DOCUMENTS, announced 'les
images/ les documents/ les textes de notre temps'
offering, in other words, 'documents' of the present day. Popular
art, pin-ups and celebrity mug shots figured in publications like
the German magazine Der Querschnitt.
Cahiers d'Art,
in the late 1920s, covered
'Painting-sculpture-architecture-music-theatre-discs-cinema'. In
terms of content the journal closest to DOCUMENTS was Jazz, a
monthly review dedicated to 'l'actualité intellectuelle' edited by a
remarkable woman explorer, Titayna. Not only did Jazz reproduce
Eli Lotar's abattoir photos but in its second issue (January 1929)
it included a horrific sequence of photos of Chinese executions,
including public beheadings and the notorious killing by a
'thousand pieces' (Bataille was haunted by a photograph of this
horrific scene given to him by his analyst, Adrien Borel, in c. 1925)
DOCUMENTS,
however, did more in its pages than chart the interesting
discoveries and materials, modern and ancient, Western and
non-Western, considered relevant to contemporary society. It
constructed - or deconstructed - them, and worked them into a series
of challenges to those disciplines that were implied by its
rubric. DOCUMENTS differed from other magazines of the period in its
treatment of its heterogeneous subjects. The interaction between text
and image, and between image and image, is complicated and
unexpected. Whereas Variétés
made a game, very simply decoded, of comparing or contrasting pairs
of images, especially art and popular culture (Charlie Chaplin beside
Jean Crotti's painting-relief Clown) sometimes via a title (a
Magritte painting
beside the fictional detective Nick Carter, under the heading
'Mysteries'), DOCUMENTS' use of 'resemblance' drew visual and
thematic parallels, hilarious and shocking, that undermined
categories and the search for meaning.
Not
infrequently DOCUMENTS picked the same topic as one just discussed
in another magazine but wholly subverted the spirit of the original
article. Take, for example, Lotar's notorious photographs of the
abattoir at La Villette
and Bataille's Critical Dictionary
entry on 'Abattoir' .This text links the slaughterhouse to temples
of bygone eras and evokes 'the ominous grandeur typical of those
places in which blood flows'; photos and text relate to Bataille's
inter
est
in sacrifice and suspicion of the modern religion of
hygiene, which are consistent concerns within DOCUMENTS. But it
cannot be coincidental that Cahiers
d'Art
in 1928 had published as part of its series on modern architecture a
sequence of striking photographs of the 1907 abattoirs at Lyon.
These
'model edifices', in Christian Zervos's words, 'correspond
absolutely to their purpose and fulfil their role according to the
most recent requirements of economy and
hygiene.
Bataille's reference by contrast to the 'chaotic aspect of
present-day slaughterhouses' together with Lotar's repulsive photos
of bloody floors and indistinguishable lumps of flesh and skin
directly confront the modernist efficiency lauded by Cahiers d'Art,
whose photographs of the clean structures of the buildings are
unpeopled and unsullied.
In
the 1978 Hayward Gallery exhibition Dada
and Surrealism Reviewed,
the section devoted to DOCUMENTS undeniably stood spectacularly
apart as an alternative to orthodox Surrealism. The very inclusion
of DOCUMENTS in Dada and Surrealism Reviewed was much debated
and finally sealed on the advice of Michel Leiris, one of
Bataille's closest collaborators.
Leiris,
himself previously a member of the surrealist movement and
participant in the bitter exchanges between the dissident
surrealists gathered round Bataille's DOCUMENTS and the orthodox
group led by the founder Andre Breton, may well have anticipated the
ensuing critical revision of Surrealism which has seen the
darker counter-currents of Bataille's 'base materialism' as a
favoured alternative to Breton's 'idealism'.
Although
the 1978 exhibition took the dada and surrealist reviews as its
structuring principle, it followed a fairly consistent tripartite
mode of display, separating works of art chosen objects and
documents (journals, books, letters, etc). Here, the aim has been to
reflect the visual aesthetic of the review itself, juxtaposing
different kinds of objects to cut across .conventional
hierarchies, grouping paintings, ethnographic objects, films,
photographs, sculpture or crime magazines
in relation to the key strategies and ideas in DOCUMENTS. The
magazine was, itself, a 'playful museum that simultaneously
collects and reclassifies its specimens'.
Rather
than simply amassing as many as possible of those tlungs, reproduced
in the pages of its 15 issues, we want to represent the magazine
itself as an active force, relying on its core ideas as a means
of presenting the objects they made extraordinary.
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